Kshemendra Paul's Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture (PGFSOA) podcast now available

 The podcast of Kshemendra Paul's talk on “The Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture (PGFSOA)”  recorded at our  March SOA Consortium meeting is now available.  During his talk, Kshemendra spoke of his experience employing an SOA strategy for information sharing at the Department of Justice and the Federal Chief Information Officers Council's initiative to develop a Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture. 

The PGFSOA speaks to service-orientation at three levels, service oriented enterprise, service oriented architecture and service oriented infrastructure.  Below, excerpted from version 1.1 of the PGFSOA, are a diagram of the three levels and a summary of key recommendations at each level.  For more information, I encourage you to listen to the podcast, review the PGFSOA and participate in the current  round of public review.

Recommendations for Service Oriented Enterprise

• Treat SOA as a change initiative. It must have strong executive buy-in, adequate resources, organizational visibility and sustained support.
• Create a program plan with goals and objectives, and objective performance measures for the SOA initiative.
• Establish a Center of Excellence (COE) to guide and manage the SOA initiative.
• Adequately fund the COE and the SOA initiative.
• Develop and sustain appropriate and viable Communities of Interest (COI) to help facilitate the development and use of shared standards, platforms and semantics.
• Establish formal funding mechanisms to support the creation and delivery of services, coupled with appropriate charging mechanisms that are tied to service usage.
• Establish a Federated Governance structure that includes a charter defining organizational structure and relationships, scope of responsibility, rules of behavior, conflict resolution processes and the authority and structure of the COE.
• Adopt a twin-track SDLC that facilitates the incremental, innovative refresh of the IT assets on an on-going basis.
• Create and use a services development, test and evaluation laboratory to meet enterprise requirements.
• Adopt procurement policies and processes that encourage vendor competition around service models.

Recommendations for Service Oriented Architecture

• Develop, in collaboration with business units and IT, business models that help to align the EA with business objectives.
• Develop an EA Target Architecture that is service based and focused on business priorities.
• Based on the service-based Target Architecture, develop investment portfolios that are founded on services and solutions focused on fulfilling key business objectives.
• Establish or adopt reference architectures and reference implementations that can be used by project implementation teams to jump start their SOA efforts.
• Use the EA artifacts and the database of information developed during the EA process to mitigate the compliance burden placed on projects.
• Assess all legacy assets in terms of their relationship to Target Architecture objectives, and factor this analysis into decisions for how to provision each service.

Recommendations for Service Oriented Infrastructure

• Adopt a Federated approach to security and privacy for defined Communities of Interest (COI) that identifies common security and privacy solutions based on a risk/reward approach.
• Determine the most effective approach to achieve semantic interoperability, either through processes like NIEM or through semantic technologies.
• Incorporate run time and build time service management functionality to define, monitor, enforce, and adjust Service Level Agreements (SLA).
• Utilize a Registry/Repository to discover needed services during application build and to insure that key criteria such as reliability, efficiency, dependency, and adherence to and/or violations of policies are fulfilled.
• Adopt a trust model that addresses both security and privacy and also quality of service.
• Establish a collaborative test/evaluation and certification/accreditation process for services.
• Evaluate emerging technology against relevant test cases. For example: Internet Business Logic (www.reengineeringllc.com); using better technology can lead to working smarter rather than just working harder.